The Unblemished (22 page)

Gyorsi Salavaria entered the city on the evening of December 1st.

It meant something to him that such an action should take place
on the first day of the month. It was irrational, he knew, but such
minor coincidences – which were not really coincidences at all – gave
him the belief that he was operating on a clean canvas, with a fresh
palette. It was a new day, a new month. A dawning.

He arrived in a car – a Cherokee Jeep – that he had stolen from
one of the drives of the cottages near to the junk shop where he had
courted Claire and her mother. To no avail. He had not driven for
thirty years yet had not anticipated any trouble. Nevertheless, the
alien dashboard, the automatic gears, the endless positions the seat
could be adjusted to conspired to delay him to the point where he
thought his theft might be over before it had really taken place. But
by the time he got the car out of the country roads and on to the dual
carriageway he had mastered its various peccadilloes. The Jeep was
handy once he reached the city; four-wheel drive helped him over the
bodies in the streets, the rubble strewn across the pavements and
roads. Each judder and crunch sent a delicious, bracing pain through
the bruises on his face.

The events of a few days previously had rocked him. He had
believed his passage to the head of the colony would occur without
obstruction. It had more or less been promised him, half a lifetime ago.
He had paid his dues. He had kept his body clean. He had adapted it
to make it more acceptable, in accordance with the colony's long,
magnificent history. He had proved himself, his diligence and devastation,
his fleet-footedness, his guile, on countless occasions. So what
was happening? Why was he being overlooked? His prize had been
snatched from him at the moment of his grasping it.

But he had to believe that he still had a part to play. After
dispatching Ray he had returned to the junk shop and sat down at it's
centre, his feet kicking out exhaustedly in front of him, the floor
covered in black shards from old 78s, and closed his good eye, concentrated
on reducing the boil of his anger to a manageable simmer, the
rampancy of his heartbeat to something approaching normal.

It was important that things be done the right way. They had
waited so long for this moment that nothing but the correct protocols
and ceremonies was befitting of their reawakening.

He had drawn himself upright, the sun having disappeared from
the sky a few hours earlier. He stood in the shadows and felt his
confidence stream back. He had not been forsaken. He had had his
wrist slapped. He was still involved and he would not allow himself
to be bested like that again. There would be an endgame that
depended heavily on his input, he was convinced of that.

And now here, in the city, the loud, looming lovely city. He could
smell the madness in the air, that special miasma that London was
blessed with, a perfume of carrion and cloaca, fast food, carbon
monoxide, and sweat. The streets were empty and dark. His was the
only car driving into the city along crippled, uneven Gower Street. He
rode in past the cameras and speed traps, running red lights, driving
on the pavement sometimes to avoid abandoned vehicles, sailing
along a bus lane that, at any other time, would have landed him with
a hefty fine. Already he felt like the king of the city. It was all laid
open for him like a tart, or a dead girl's chocolate box of freshly
exposed organs.

Take your pick, take the lot, help yourself.

It excited him in a way he had not experienced since his early days
of killing. It was a lofty, buzzy excitement, highly addictive, definitely
narcotic, the kind that initially fills you with euphoria before making
you feel as though you've been flushed through with warm fluid,
cleansed, turned into something that was only ever designed for relaxation.
He always slept best after a murder, he found. It was a combination
of factors that did it for him. The thrill of the expression was
one, perhaps
the
one. It was the same for him in the way it is for some
men who hunger for a view of women's breasts: they are essentially
the same, but always different. He liked the segue from surprise to
alarm to shock to outright fear. And yet fear, proper fear, was
something that people did not often, if at all, know anything about.
It was not the stock reaction to monsters and madmen in Hollywood
films; it was something very different.

Fear manifested itself as a kindred spirit of humour. The people
who were scared beyond reason had the look of people who were
about to laugh out loud, he found. He supposed it must come from
the same tap root of emotion. The person half frightened to death
was the person who had been taken so far down the line that madness
was the end of the line. Hysteria could take you in any number of
directions, once its teeth were sunk into you. You laughed, you
screamed, you died. It was a hell of an entertainment.

The first killing, back in 1973, had been that of a fifteen-year-old
girl, Linda Meadows, a girl fresh out of school that he had shadowed
for the best part of three weeks since seeing her emerge from a
hairdresser's in Liverpool, where she worked as an assistant. He had
gone in there once, having spent an hour drumming up the courage,
and she had washed and conditioned his hair, shyly expressed
surprise that a man should go to this trouble when they were more
often than not in the barber's further along the street, having a dry
cut and talking about football. He had spun her some story about
how he was a junior minister up from the Houses of Parliament to
visit relatives and he needed to have a professional haircut because he
was appearing on a lunch-time television debate that very day. She'd
asked for his autograph, which he gave her. He gave her a tip too,
after the hairdresser had finished his short back and sides. He'd
walked away, returning as it grew dark to watch through the misted
windows as she brushed up all of the hair that had dropped that day.
The thought of his hair mixed up in a refuse bag with other people's
gave him a bizarre thrill.

He watched her leave the hairdresser's and walk to the bus stop, a
hundred yards or so further along the street. A fish-and-chip shop
was open behind it, and a couple of youths sitting on the doorstep
tossed a few degrading remarks her way, which, he was impressed to
see, she deflected with stoic good humour. She waited for a long time
for the bus, and he admired the way she leaned against the wooden
bus shelter, the natural poise and elegance of her long limbs that most
other girls of a similar age and build might feel uncomfortable or
gawky with. She was wearing a large grey coat with chunky wooden
buttons. It seemed too large for her; maybe it was something she was
borrowing from an older sister. She also wore blue jeans and white
shoes. She fiddled with a thin gold necklace while she waited, her
unmade face growing redder as the cold intensified. He remembered
her smell in the hairdresser's – difficult to do with the pervasive
odours of scorching hairdryers, shampoo and lacquer, but important
to him, a part of the whole process and one that he could not do
without. She was Charlie and peppermint creams, Daz and Imperial
Leather. She wore lip salve. He liked the way she kept pressing her
lips together after finishing a sentence, the slight gumminess there. He
liked that she didn't ask him if he was going out tonight, if he had
been on holiday. No doubt that would be drummed into her as her
training increased. In that respect, he would be saving her from a
lifetime of cliché and monotony.

He watched her get on the bus and followed in his Vauxhall Viva at
a discreet distance. He didn't pay any heed to where the bus was
heading. He just followed it, his eye on the soft brown hair in the
window at the back of the lower deck. He guessed she was sitting here
because the engine was underneath her; the bus was warmest there. But
an irrational, excited voice in him said no, she was sitting there so that
he could see her. Her special man from the House of Commons. The
man she'd talk about to her family and friends when she got home.
You'll never guess whose hair I washed today. Look, I got him to sign
my diary.

He wondered if she had liked him, fancied him even. He could
imagine walking out with a girl like that, taking her to bars and
restaurants, showing her a good time. It was important that he be
attracted to them. He knew this was a part of it, a part of what was
required of him. They needed to know that in the deepest, darkest
moments of his savagery, there was love; that his devastating attacks
were motivated by love. Of them, of the victim. Love was all they
asked for. It was the only thing that mattered.

And so she finally got off the bus somewhere in Old Swan, on her
final night on Earth, and walked down four streets that diminished in
size and illumination, until she was, Salavaria reasoned, close to where
she needed to be. He parked the car and nimbly leaped out, just as she
was shaking her door keys free of her cumbersome duffel coat.

'Have you ever considered a career in politics?' he asked her.

She turned around and smiled at him. He knew how he must look
to her. One of his strengths was his ability to view himself in any
given scenario. He had cinematic vision. He knew how the light and
shade played with people. He understood the importance of drama,
of impact.

Here he is, his back to the streetlamp, his collar turned up. Shadows
must fill his eye sockets, and colour in the lines growing in the hollowed
cheeks. His mouth, as all mouths do at night, in unnatural light, looks
blue-grey. His hair, a long way off from becoming the silver tumble of
its future, is black and shiny from the attention this girl lavished upon
it. She is happy and sad at the same time. Something in her crumples,
like spirit, like life itself. She gives herself to him as if this has always
been a part of her design, the thing that defines her. It's as if it were
written in pink ink in the pages of the diary she gave him to sign.

He holds out his hand and she shyly mirrors him. Without looking
at him, she accepts his grip. He leads her off the road on to the recreation
ground at the back of this terrace of tired grey houses.

'You are exquisite,' he says.

She says, 'Kiss me good-bye.'

He does so. It becomes a beautiful act, out there on the cold, faecal
playing fields. In her bloody passing, she is sudden art, something to
be framed and stared at by generations. Her death is a kind of life
eternal. She will never be forgotten, she will always stay young. Her
face will peer out from the pages of newspapers all around the world.
Or this is how he sees it, applying a cosmetic from his own imagination
to the bloody squirm of lips desperately trying to deliver a cry
from behind his fingers. The fists with which she tries to box his head
and balls become clenched hands of beseechment that the glory be
delivered swiftly and painlessly. She swears at him, but he doesn't
hear it. All he hears is her saying his name.

When the tragi-comic mask of her ending has been peeled from her
skull, he unravels her on the dew-soaked grass and snaffles her
thymus, her kidneys, her ovaries while they are still hot. He lowers
himself on to and into the shallow hollowed bowl of her corpse and
thanks her, sending every shred of goodwill he can muster into these
gurgling remnants as they drain into the soil. Every twitch and flicker
of his muscles is greeted by some tiny opposing suck of her own, as if
she were trying to keep him here, to prolong the moment. But he peels
himself away as the sky is turning ochre, the cold in his bones giving
him an ache that will not relent until he has bathed for half an hour
in hot water.

He staggers away. There is movement in the trees although the
wind has long since died. He stands at the corner of the park watching
the magical spill of dawn. Her face blazes across the synapses of his
mind as if tattooed, branded there.

Ridding young people of life was such hard graft. They were strong.
It clung to them, life, as tenaciously as a barnacle to a whale. Driving
it out of them was exhausting; he understood, to some degree, how
those who did it often were caught. You reached a threshold, a limit.
Your body railed against the effort, physical and mental. You began
to get sloppy. You made mistakes. You left clues. You began along the
road where you entertained the idea of being caught. It was intoxicating
to imagine the fuss that would be made of you. The attention.
The infamy. Your place in the pantheon of serial killers. A kind of
respect. A sort of life. You kidded yourself that you wanted that
attention when all along it was because the misery of hard work was
seeping through your bones like winter in a dying tree.

Not for him. The hard work was a stepping-stone to a different
place. The hard work was a means, not the end. That was the mistake
all of those other monsters had made. For them, the hard work was
the result, its own reward. Such a reward can lose its flavour over
time. Salavaria had known back then that his reward was a long way
off. The hard work focused him on it. He knew he had to perfect his
labours in order to put himself on the right track to reach that
reward. He knew he would be closer to the grave than the cradle by
the time it came his way. He also knew that nothing on Earth would
stop him from claiming it, when the time was right.

Linda Meadows. Born January 15, 1958. Died March 1, 1973.
Always in my thoughts. You tasted like burnt treacle. Thank you.
Thank you.

* * *

Salavaria broke into the Monet Suite on the fifth floor of the Savoy
hotel. He was invisible. He was wallpaper. Death had been dealt on the
broad sweeping staircases; it had trickled down the marble and deep
pile, puddled around his shoes. There was a cluster of severed heads on
the concierge's desk, all bearing the same tired, nauseous expression of
someone who has just stepped off a ferry in gale-force winds. Blood
zigzagged along the corridors where bodies had been hauled off to be
ransacked; red footprints marched into and out of trouble. Inedible
organs had been discarded like the wrappers from children's sweets.